'I could not stop crying'

Sixteen years after being snatched as a child from her family amid a torrent of sex abuse allegations, one of those at the heart of that troubling time in Orkney tells Esther Addley why she's suing social services

It is a strange and sordid story - and, whatever the exact truth, now disputed and half lost and two decades old, a terribly unhappy one. Eight children from the same family are taken from their classrooms one day, forced into the back of a police car and driven away, with scarcely a word of explanation, by social workers. They are separated and placed alone in different institutions or foster homes, barring the two youngest, aged four and five, who are told their birth mother is dead and given to another family for adoption. It is six years before the last of the children is returned to their mother, the "abuse" for which they were taken away, but for which no one has ever been charged, apparently no longer a risk.

Sixteen years after it happened to her, Karen (not her real name) wants answers. Specifically, she wants "closure" on a lifetime of upset and terror that only began to fade when she became a mother two years ago, and at last felt that she was "grown up" and out of danger.

Now 24, she was six when she was removed from her mother and her small Orkney community, an unhappy 13 when she was allowed to return. In between, she says, she ran away from her foster carers and, at the age of 11, tried to kill herself. She's pretty together today - abrupt, matter-of-fact, able to discuss her childhood terrors without upset or, really, much emotion. All the same, her experiences have "ruined" her, she says. She is suing Orkney social services for damages, a first step towards repair.

The story of the children from Karen's family may seem vaguely familiar; in fact, it was a sequence of events that postdated their removal by some months that would collapse into scandal, commanding national headlines and provoking a judicial inquiry, while Karen and her siblings' case went largely unremarked. In February 1991, nine children from four families on the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay were taken from their beds by a group of social workers convinced they had uncovered a satanic abuse paedophile ring. It was quite the season for sex cult spotting: in the late 80s and early 90s, more than 100 children were removed from their families in Cleveland, Nottinghamshire, Rochdale, Bishop Auckland and Ayrshire, by social workers citing allegations of ritualistic abuse. In the most extreme cases, these included accounts of children forced to eat faeces, drink blood and have sex with hooded adults.

These were complex, troubling cases incorporating scarcely believable accounts of depravity. And in almost every case, in the end, the accounts of ritual abuse would come to be disbelieved. After the "satanic panic", attributed to a culture of over-imagination among social workers, came the apparently rational backlash and a number of inquiries into what were accepted to have been injustices against innocent families. The other Orkney children were returned after five weeks to their families, who would later accept an out of court settlement. Meanwhile, the children of what was termed the "W" family, of whom Karen was one, remained in their foster homes.

Although her six-year-old memories are understandably patchy, Karen's description of the day of her removal is vivid: running down her school corridors, screaming, being restrained by the arms and bundled into a police car.

"I just sat in the back of the car and the social worker said, 'You're being taken away because you are being abused by adults on the island.' And I said to my brothers, 'What does that mean?' None of us really knew what that word meant. From that day on, we completely lost control of our lives."

She was put in a children's home in Glasgow, her brothers and sisters taken elsewhere. After a while - she's not certain how long - she was placed with a foster family, then another. She remembers the car journeys and the nausea, being driven from place to place. That, and the terrible sadness. "I was constantly crying," she says. "In the sense where I could not stop myself crying. And it just got worse. I went from a very bubbly, outgoing child to a ... I would sit on my own and just cry, but uncontrollably. To myself. At that age, it shows a great depression in myself. And that's really the state I was in, constantly."

Initially, she was allowed to see her mother, she thinks about once a fortnight. "I would see her in the presence of two social workers and a police officer. We weren't allowed to cuddle each other, we weren't allowed to sit together - I wasn't allowed to sit on the sofa beside her. Social workers would be sitting there staring at both of us, just to see what we were going to say. It was very, very intense, unrelaxing. I couldn't cuddle my mother. Disturbing. It's a form of torture, I think." After she moved to her second foster parents, the meetings were stopped.

What continued, however, were the twice weekly meetings with a social worker called Liz McLean, who features as a monstrous figure in Karen's stories, always referred to by her full name. She would be left alone in the room with this woman - the same social worker who had taken her from her school - for up to two hours, she says.

"I was terrified of her. She was very intimidating, very controlling. I was always small when I was a child but she would lean over me. She got very angry. She would want me to agree with what she was saying." Which was? "They were mentioning about private parts, things like that. Asking me, did one of the grown-ups touch you and touch your brothers and sisters in your private parts? They would want me to agree with it. And when Liz McLean couldn't get me to agree with it, she would ask me to draw a picture. So I drew a picture of my pony. That wasn't right. Then I drew a picture of us playing football. That wasn't right. Eventually, she pulled this piece of paper out which had a circle on it, and she said, 'Copy that.' So I drew a circle and she said, 'Draw little stick men round it,' and that's what I did. And she said, 'You're being very good.' And that was the meetings."

McLean is also mentioned by several of the children in the subsequent Orkney scandal as a terrifying figure, fixated on finding satanic abuse. Other children also described being urged by McLean to draw circles and faces, presumably as evidence suggestive of abusive rites. She was later sharply criticised in the Lord Clyde's judicial inquiry into the latter case, and in another investigation into similar allegations in Ayrshire. She resigned in 1992, and has since disappeared.

Karen left Orkney when she was 17, still "terrified" as a result of her removal and other experiences while in foster care. She now lives with her partner and child in York, and is coming to the end of a degree course in dance. She would like to be a choreographer.

This is a horror story. It is not, however, the whole story. When Karen broke her silence last month, speaking to a women's magazine, she gave a name for the first time to a family who received only passing mention in the reports of the other, more widely publicised, Orkney removals. It was because of allegations made by members of this family, it was alleged at the time, that the other nine children on Orkney were taken into care. Eight children from the unnamed family had been removed and placed in care some months before, although this was not the first time they had been removed from their home. Three years earlier, their father had been jailed on charges of abuse.

Karen says her father's jailing in 1986 is not relevant to her removal four years later. She can't remember the exact charge, and they have had no contact since. She disputes the account of an older sister who described a dark and bizarre life of poverty and cruelty, in which the children slept on chairs and sofas, and were forced by their father to eat raw tripe or strip naked to be horsewhipped. Any suggestions of abuse within the family after his jailing, Karen says, are "just false". "My dad was dealt with in 1986, and they took us away in 1990. There's no justification at all."

Did allegations made by her brothers and sisters lie behind the wider Orkney scandal? "I would never say that a child's testimony in the company of Liz McLean at the time [is reliable]. She was a very manipulative woman, and she would write what she wanted to write. I would doubt any child supposedly making allegations in that situation."

Exactly where the truth lies will be for an Edinburgh court to determine. What is clear is that the tragedy of the children in Karen's family is darker and more complex than it first appears.

Karen is bringing the case now, she says, "because I am not scared any more. And I think that is down to realising that, hang on, I deserve justice in life as much as any other family does. And if I have to get there at the age of 24, so be it. But it will come."

Backstory

After allegations of child abuse involving satanic ritual sex games in a quarry, police and social workers raided homes in South Ronaldsay, Orkney Islands in the early hours of February 27 1991. Nine children were seized, bundled into a chartered plane and taken to homes on the mainland. Other high profile alleged child abuse cases in Cleveland, Rochdale and Nottingham had made national headlines around the same time.

The allegations, it was alleged at the time, stemmed from another case. Children in the "W" family were taken off the island and into care following the earlier imprisonment of their father. Three of the children, it was reported, made allegations of organised sexual abuse during "disclosure therapy sessions" with police and social workers.

Within five weeks the case collapsed and the nine children, aged between eight and 15, were returned to their homes. The Crown Office had concluded that no individual would face charges. Sheriff David Kelbie said the interviews with the children were manipulative.

There followed a £6m seven-month inquiry by Lord Clyde. His 363-page report, in October 1992, heavily criticised the way Orkney social service handled the allegations, rebuked most of the senior individuals in the case and made 194 recommendations. The W children remained in care and their case was not specifically addressed by the inquiry.

In March 1996 the four families at the centre of the scandal accepted a full apology from the islands council and compensation. The W family have not been offered compensation.

• This article was amended on 26 August 2009. The original article gave the name of the interviewee. This has now been changed at her request.